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WebAssembly Studio

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Re: WebAssembly Studio

#121

Post by brabel »

simonh wrote: post #112
zamadatix wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does being MIT licensed have to do with it It's a non commercial non government project. > And please, don't anyone dare chime in with the the standard "if people want a feature in open source they can 'simply' implement it themselves". Already talked about it in the parent comment, would be interesting if you could respond to that instead of asking nobody mention it. > UI technologies that don't include acces…

>It's a non commercial non government project. Yes I know that, what's that got to do with not having accessibility? And no it doesn't have to be perfect, it comes down to what we consider acceptable.

I am thankful to the author for not thinking like you, as if they did perhaps there would be no WASM Studio at all as they wouldn't have the time/knowledge/perseverance to continue writing the app far enough to be accessible and perfect for everyone. Luckily, they did the really hard work of getting something that's usable to at least a few of us! And it's been really useful to me as I am trying to write a language targeting WASM.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#122

Post by curryst »

joshjhargreaves wrote: post #87
clickness wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your comment as unnecessarily abrasive, self-entitled almost. > "It breaks my heart that when this project was started in 2017, some 20 years after web accessibility advocacy had started in earnest, the developer was still uninformed enough about accessibility that they would create a custom button component with no ARIA support." You're assuming ignorance and malice, when in all actuality this most likely com…

It's almost as if some people get off on the feeling of self-importance they get for 'calling people out' in this manner- the neckbeards of accessibility. In an ideal world, accessibility would come for free - but unfortunately it does not. Yes I would argue that morally projects should do their best to support it - but even at well established companies it takes significant resources to maintain accessibility. Yes i…

It's an intractable problem; most people believe software should be accessible to people with different needs, and most people also believe that other people shouldn't be able to force you to do work for free.

Which one you decide on seems like a value judgement to me. Is it fair that instead of shipping that feature you really want this month, you have to do accessibility features? I don't think the answer is black and white.

FWIW, accessibility seems hard. I am not a good web dev, and the conversations that spin out from these accessibility conversations frequently go right over my head. I can build a pretty basic React site, but I have no idea how to add accessibility components to that, or how I would test whether my site is accessible or not.

Part of this problem is probably lack of exposure. I know what a screenreader is, but I don't know how they work. I don't know what makes it easy to traverse a page with a screenreader and what makes it hard. It would probably help a lot if we forced devs to have experience with accessibility tools so they know they work.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#123

Post by Yuioup »

pjmlp wrote: post #5
tomasreimers wrote: post #2

Jokes about the [Birth and Death of JavaScript]( https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... ) aside, I love the concept of WASM and that we're making the web a more robust compile target. One of the big limitations in my mind is that I still don't know of that many people using it in production at scale. Is there a list, or well known set of examples (other than Figma), who are using WASM in prod…

Autodesk. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/autocad-webassembly/ https://blogs.autodesk.com/autocad/autocad-web-app-google-io... https://forge.autodesk.com/blog/load-encrypted-model-data-we... BabylonJS plugins https://babylonjs.medium.com/marker-tracking-in-babylon-js-c... Blazor https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor Uno https://platform.uno/

The 90s called. They want their RAD tools back.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#124

Post by cassetti »

mwcampbell wrote: post #10

The "Create New Project" dialog has serious accessibility problems when used with a screen reader. The buttons are clickable divs, not actual HTML buttons or even marked up with proper ARIA. I haven't yet ventured any further into the app. Given that the app is a WebAssembly development environment, my first guess was that it was built in WebAssembly itself, with a custom UI framework. But in fact, it's plain React,…

> It breaks my heart

This is all a little dramatic, no? It's a cool app that can be easily updated to fix button accessibility.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#125

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tomasreimers wrote: post #2

Jokes about the [Birth and Death of JavaScript]( https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... ) aside, I love the concept of WASM and that we're making the web a more robust compile target. One of the big limitations in my mind is that I still don't know of that many people using it in production at scale. Is there a list, or well known set of examples (other than Figma), who are using WASM in prod…

Unity, the very popular 3D game engine, can “export” games to run in the browser. WebAssembly is undoubtedly involved.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#126

Post by Vinnl »

rhencke wrote: post #103
wffurr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard is it to just use a damn For a button on a web page? Basic HTML already works perfectly in a screen reader with no effort. It requires effort to screw it up.

Perhaps you could open a pull request to fix this.

That would presumably be roughly equivalent to send a PR to translate a single dialog to English when the entire interface is in French.

Sure, if an app is not fully translated and there's a lingering French string somewhere, submit a PR. But in this case, I don't see how this can be a serious suggestion.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#127

Post by brabel »

codeflo wrote: post #114
dboreham wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also intrigued by the possibilities of WebAssembly. However I also have a nagging feeling "didn't we already do this with Java, 20 years ago?". Wondering what's different this time, or is this just a MySpace vs Facebook second-times-the-charm thing.

I’m not sure either. There are some technical differences. WASM is more low-level than JVM bytecode, which is important for some applications and makes it a more normal compiler target. It’s more integrated with the rest of the browser: it doesn’t come with its own rectangle like Flash and Java did, but instead manipulates the DOM just like (or at the moment, only through) JavaScript. And it’s a true open standard, n…

WASM is definitely more low-level than JVM byte code right now... but I'm not sure it'll remain that way given the many proposals that are very likely to be implemented in the future (even though it's taking a long time for even simple ones, like multi-value returns, to get into the standard). For example, with WASI and GC, which will finally enable direct access to the DOM, how much lower-level will WASM be compared to JVM? Not much, I would say.

The big difference is that WASM, from the beginning, is supported by all the browsers natively (a consequence of it not being a proprietary technology, but an open standard), not as a plugin... If Java had started that way, the story would've turned out quite differently (but we know that at the time, the browser everyone was using was made by Microsoft, and Sun was a competitor so this would've never happened).

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#128

Post by Vinnl »

bavell wrote: post #24
mwcampbell wrote: post #10

The "Create New Project" dialog has serious accessibility problems when used with a screen reader. The buttons are clickable divs, not actual HTML buttons or even marked up with proper ARIA. I haven't yet ventured any further into the app. Given that the app is a WebAssembly development environment, my first guess was that it was built in WebAssembly itself, with a custom UI framework. But in fact, it's plain React,…

I'm guilty of this more often than I should be. I think the reason I sometimes reach for divs over buttons or other semantic elements is because I've been burned by default browser behavior treating them special when I just want a dumb box with a dumb click handler - no default styling that I need to override, no need to call .preventDefault(), no need to worry about the matrix of OS+browser+device that each treats a…

Interesting - I would have expected the reverse to be true, i.e. if you often reach for divs first, you'd often be burned by e.g. enter-to-submit not working, or the wrong keyboard showing up on mobile, etc.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#129

Post by rhencke »

Vinnl wrote: post #126
rhencke wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could open a pull request to fix this.

That would presumably be roughly equivalent to send a PR to translate a single dialog to English when the entire interface is in French. Sure, if an app is not fully translated and there's a lingering French string somewhere, submit a PR. But in this case, I don't see how this can be a serious suggestion.

It was a serious suggestion.

By working to understand and solve the problem that seems easy on its surface, either:

1. It ends up harder than it seems. The original poster gains a better understanding of what is preventing the originally proposed solution from working, and is in a better place to judge what needs changing, and generally everyone wins.

2. It ends up as easy as it seems. Not much time is spent, the original poster makes a valuable suggestion in the form of a patch/PR, and generally everyone wins.

Re: WebAssembly Studio

#130

Post by benjaminjackman »

pjmlp wrote: post #66
chrisweekly wrote: post #45

Question for anyone with real WASM experience: what are your top recommended entry points / reference materials? AssemblyScript seems pretty approachable at 1st glance...

AssemblyScript is one of the best options, because if the only thing you care about is some high level language that outputs WebAssembly, then you are still using Web related tools. Then D is quite easy to use (LDC alongside betterC mode, runtime is still not fully ported). Followed by TinyGo, Rust, C#, Nim. I would leave Emscripten, C and C++, only for porting existing code into the Web, as even with the sandbox mem…

> corruptions of data allocated in the linear memory blocks are susceptible to occur

I don't know if I quite understand this. Is this a web-assembly specific thing, or just the standard C / C++ are "unsafe by default" languages which can cause memory corruption etc because e.g. of off by one errors in pointer arithmetic and so on.

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